Rockstar Punishes 'GTA Online' Cheaters By Completely Resetting Their Accounts

Rockstar Games isn't pulling any punches when it comes to dealing with cheaters in Grand Theft Auto Online. Typically when a player is caught cheating in a video game, they'll end up slapped with a ban. Rockstar has opted for a slightly different route, choosing to instead completely reset the offending accounts and force them to start the game from scratch.

To be fair, banning a player and blocking them from getting back into their account is effectively the same as wiping their progress but... it just feels like there's something so much savage about letting a cheater continue to play under an account that had once made so much more progress. It almost serves as a constant reminder that their actions cost them everything.

Rockstar

In this instance, players impacted by this round of punishments had been exploiting an existing glitch for personal gain. Abusing a bug related to the GTA Online property system, these players were able to easily - and illegally - make themselves millions of dollars. Rockstar obviously wasn't thrilled about this, and tracked down every player who pulled off the exploit. They each had their money, guns, clothes, properties, and cars completely wiped away - regardless of whether it had been obtained via the cheat or not.

"Players found to be manipulating and abusing Property trade-ins to gain GTA$ illegitimately have had affected characters reset," a Rockstar support entry explained last month. "As part of our ongoing efforts to maintain a healthy game environment for all players, anyone found to be abusing exploits and cheats to illegitimately gain GTA$ and in-game items may be subject to penalties including cash balance adjustments, character resets, suspensions and up to permanent bans as appropriate."

As you can imagine, there are a fair few players who are less than thrilled with having lost what would have amounted to weeks of work or thousands in microtransactions. I say it would have amounted to these things, but the players who used the exploit obviously didn't put quite that much of a grind in to get what they wanted.

My advice? Maybe don't cheat in an online game. I suppose that's not any use to you now if you've already been punished, but keep hold of that pearl of wisdom going forward, yeah? Yeah.

Topics: Rockstar Games, GTA Online, Grand Theft Auto